Buenos Aires, Mar 27 (EFE). – Residents of Miramar, a coastal city in Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, have built the world’s tallest chocolate Easter Bunny, a creation that stands 5.2 meters (just over 17 feet) tall and weighs 3,000 kilos (3.3 tons), city officials told EFE on Sunday.

“In the past six years, around this time, we have made giant Easter eggs, but since other cities started imitating us, we decided this year to go with another Easter symbol, the rabbit,” Miramar tourism director Carlos Pagliardini said.

Workers spent 10 days assembling the Easter Bunny’s body with chocolate “bricks” and later sculpted the head and ears.

“It’s an architectural, engineering and craft work,” Pagliardini said, adding that the chocolate Easter Bunny was the world’s tallest.

The previous record was held by the Brazilian city of Gramado, which built a 4.1-meter (13.4-foot) Easter Bunny that weighed 3,800 kilos (nearly 4.2 tons) in 2014, Pagliardini said.

The giant chocolate bunny is on display in downtown Miramar and will be broken up on Sunday afternoon, with the pieces handed out to the thousands of tourists spending their Easter vacation in the city, located on the Atlantic Ocean some 450 kilometers (279 miles) south of the capital.

Miramar officials distributed chunks of the giant Easter egg to about 30,000 people last year, but the number of tourists in the city this time around is higher, with hotel occupancy running at more than 75 percent and more visitors expected to try to get a taste of the giant Easter Bunny. EFE